Page 52 of Her Property

“She told me when she came back here for James’ funeral that she wished she knew how to tell you how sorry she was. How she thought she couldn’t be a good mother to you and how she left you with her parents because she was so terrified of messing you and James up. She said she didn’t want her broken heart infecting her boys. But she realized too late how wrong she’d been. How she messed it up so badly by leaving. She said she tried to talk to you but you weren’t having any of it…”

Jake remembered with deep shame how he’d told his mother at the funeral how he never wanted to see her again. “I was lost,” he said to Aubrey now, his forehead in his hands. “I couldn’t protect James. I couldn’t stop what was happening to him. But she could have. She was the one person could have brought him back. And she came back too late.”

“How do you know that, Jake?”

“How do I know what?”

“That she could have saved James?”

Jake swallowed hard, trying to push the lump as far down as it could go. “Because I couldn’t.”

Aubrey came around the counter then and wrapped her arms around him. “It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered as Jake shook with the grief of decades.

He didn’t know if it was minutes later or an hour, but when he finally let go all he had in him, he took a breath and sat up, embarrassed, suddenly, at having shown so much.

“That feel better, honey?”

He felt like a ton of bricks had been lifted off his chest. “Yeah actually, it does.”

Then he remembered what Aubrey had said.She didn’t want her broke heart infecting her boys.

“Aubrey,” he said. “Did you ever hear anything about my mom and… Alfred Jones?”

Aubrey paused, eyeing Jake with a confused look on her face. “Why yes honey, that’s what she first came in here crying about, when she was only a teenager. He ended it with her after all that time together as kids. It was abrupt. She was in worse shape than you.”

Jake’s jaw practically hit the counter. “What do you mean all their time together?”

“They were inseparable from the minute his father bought his place.”

His mother and Alfred? Fucking lovebirds?

“That man,” Aubrey continued, “Alfred’s father Simon Jones—he was a real piece of work. Alfred’s a teddy bear compared to him. Even though I’ll never forgive Alfred for what he did to your mother. Or you, now.”

“What happened?” Jake asked.

“They were only kids at first, but she would always talk about him when she came into the shop with your grandparents. I wasn’t all that much older than her. I think she wished she had a big sister to talk about these things with—that was me, for her.”

Aubrey turned to him now, pulling on her own coat. “I thought you knew all this, Jakey. Didn’t Anne tell you?”

Jake shook his head. “Gran didn’t tell me anything at all. I only just found out that Alfred and Stella had had some kind of relationship.”

“Well. It was more than ‘some kind of of relationship’. I’d never seen two kids more in love. Every time I came over with more fries they were talking about the place they’d get together in the city, what they’d call their kids—Jake was a name I’d heard mentioned, by the way. All kinds of things you shouldn’t be talking about at sixteen.”

Jake couldn’t even compute this new information. He sat there dumbstruck.

“I had to tell them more than once to stop canoodling in that booth right over there.”

He looked over at the far booth in the back corner of the restaurant, unable to picture Alfred Jones as anything but the slick, silver-haired lawyer in fancy cars he was now. Unable to picture his mother as anything but the flighty, barely-there woman he’d so desperately wanted to stay. And so angrily told to fuck off.

“But at the end of that summer,” Aubrey said, “Alfred called it off. Said he didn’t want to see her. He needed to think about his future and she wasn’t in it. Something like that. Your mom was sobbing so hard I didn’t quite catch it all. It was so strange… I couldn’t believe it could have gone from hot to ice-cold like that. Your mother was never the same after that. I know it was the thing that set her off on that terrible path. Only a month later she’d taken up with your father, who was just passing through here. She dropped out of school and left town with him, came back six months later the size of a house.”

Jake stood there dumfounded. “Why didn’t Gran tell me any of this?”

Aubrey yawned, putting the back of her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry Jake, I really have no idea.”

But Jake did. It suddenly all made so much sense. This was why Gramps hated Alfred so much. It’s why his mom ran off. It’s why Alfred hated him now and wanted his land back.

He needed to tell Cat. If she’d even let him talk to her again, let alone about this.

---